The FIRST Hire Fractional CFOs Should Make

Hey there. Welcome back to the Connected Accountant. My name is Michael King. One of my absolute favorite sayings is if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. And I think that saying holds true in business as much as it does in life. And so you get to this point in business where you realize you've got to start building a team around you if you want to have maximum impact, if you want to get the most return on your time investment. But it can be really tricky to figure out who that first hire should be. So today, what I want to share with you is my top reasons that your first hire should absolutely be an assistant and what kinds of things an assistant should be doing for you. And at the end of this video, I'm going to share my number one resource that I 10 out of 10 recommend you check out if you're thinking about hiring an assistant to get the most value, the most bang for your buck out of that relationship with your assistant. Let's go. If you're at that stage of entrepreneurship where your business is just busting from the seams, you've probably realized that it's time to hire somebody else to give you some support because you just can't do everything all at once. And if you're at that stage stage, the question has probably gone through your mind, who is that first hire? What role should I hire first? And so you might have considered bringing on a bookkeeper or a tax preparer, maybe a financial analyst to help with the back end numbers crunching. Maybe you've even thought about bringing on an additional fractional CFO to help with client facing work. And while yes, those are all really good roles to have on your team, and I've got a lot of those people on my team right now, I can tell you that after years and years of doing this, that your first hire should actually be an assistant. Before you hire any of those other roles, you're probably sitting there thinking like, Mike, you gone cray cray. How in the world can you say that an assistant is a more important or a more valuable hire than those other roles? What I'm here to tell you is I've found four really big reasons why an assistant should be your first hire before you think about bringing on those other roles. First and foremost, a great assistant is going to help get your life personal prioritized. When you're doing all the things in our business, we've got our mind over here and over here and this client thing over there and kids soccer practice there's all these different things going on. How do you really, like, methodically work through getting them prioritized and figure out which one you need to be working on next and what you need to be focused on. Tomorrow a great assistant is going to help you work through answering those priority questions. And here in just a minute, I'm going to tell you some of the tactical things that you should do with your assistant. That'll bring a little bit more clarity around how that's going to work. But a great assistant should absolutely be helping you get your life personal and business prioritized. The next big thing that a great assistant should be doing is helping you get your business organized. When I think of a great assistant, there's somebody that, you know, everything is labeled and color coded and filed in the right way. You know, especially when I was solopreneur earlier in business, I had stuff everywhere. There's files all over the place. There's. There's no structure to anything. I'm just, you know, kind of putting stuff wherever it happens to be. There's some stuff on my desktop, there's stuff in my emails. There's just stuff everywhere. Some stuff is in my ClickUp or asana or whatever. There's just stuff everywhere. A great assistant is going to be able to kind of back up 30,000 foot view of the thing and realize what you need to do to get all those things organized so that you become more efficient. You know where to find things, you know where to expect things. And a great assistant will make it so that everything becomes a whole lot more predictable and honestly, way less stressed out. The third big value proposition of a good assistant is, is that it brings a level of accountability to your life that you're probably lacking as a solopreneur. And what I mean by that is you and your assistant are doing things like going through your calendar and getting those things prioritized. You know that you're going to have to talk with your assistant again real soon and kind of report back what you got done and what you didn't. And if you're anything like me, that's really, really important. Because as the CEO of our company, we're not reporting to anybody. But just having the knowledge that you're going to be working with your assistant day in and day out and kind of keeping him or her up to date on what you've done. It brings a level of accountability that a lot of us actually desperately need. The fourth reason that assistant is going to be really valuable for you is because a good assistant should be taking a lot of tasks off your plate, and that in and of itself will enable you to handle more client work yourself. So those, those tasks that they're taking off your place, coupled with the efficiencies that they're going to get by helping you prioritize and organize, is going to actually free up time you to handle more clients, which means more revenue, if that's something that you want to do. I will also tell you that with the prioritization and the organization and the accountability that is going to make it so that when you do hire another fractional CFO or an accountant or somebody like that, they're going to come onto a team that's kind of got their, their stuff together. It's going to make that experience for the next hire even better so that they're able to hit the ground running faster and they're able to know where things are and they're able to really get into the work and start serving clients. So. So that you can then increase your client count and revenues even further. So what kinds of things am I doing with my assistant that's helping bring that organization and prioritization and accountability the first thing that we're doing, and this is so important that this is like the highest priority thing in my opinion. Every quarter, we're looking two quarters ahead into the future and helping kind of identify what those big initiatives or rollouts or strategic goals that I have for my business, we take those and we work them backwards to make sure that there's time on the calendar to get those things done. Now, your assistant isn't going to know what those things are, but what this exercise does is it forces you as the entrepreneur to be thinking ahead long term about what those initiatives are so that you can work them backwards and get them on the calendar. Because for a lot of us, we're not thinking six months into the future. We're lucky if we're thinking six hours hours into the future. But by having time on our calendar, me and my assistant, to look ahead 2/4, I know that that call's coming up and I know that I need to show up for that call prepared. And so that forces me to think ahead. What's coming up over the next six months that I want to do? Do I have any ad campaigns, Do I have any hiring initiatives? Do I need to bring on five new clients by the time, you know, Q3 is over with, it really makes me think through those things. And then when I get on the call with my assistant, we're Talking about what those things are and identifying what are those milestones that need to happen so that we can make sure that those strategic goals are reached over the next two quarters. The next tactical kind of things I do with my assistant is every single day we get on what I call a daily check in call or a daily priorities call. And on those calls, and they range anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes. Once you get a good cadence going with your assistant, we're looking ahead at the calendar over the next two weeks. We're literally looking day by day for a at the rolling two weeks in everything that's coming up, making sure that there's time to prepare for everything, that there's sufficient time on the calendar to get things done so that there's no surprises. And I've kind of found that two weeks is the sweet spot because it's far enough into the future that we can still make sure that we're making scheduling adjustments without ever feeling stressed. But it's not so far into the future that it's kind of unrealistic. You know, if we're looking at a daily calendar six weeks into the future, I just know that there's so many things that are going to change between now and six weeks from now that it's a little bit silly for us to be looking, you know, day by day for six weeks. Two weeks has definitely proven to be the sweet spot for me. Another important part of those daily check in calls is that my assistant and I are looking at our task management platform. So my firm uses ClickUp, you might use Asana or Carbon. We make sure that anything that I need to do lives in our task management platform. And on those calls, we're making sure that everything that I have to do that's in that task management platform has a time block on my calendar. That is the only way that I found for me to make sure that I actually get everything that I need to do done. It's got to be in the task management platform and it's got to have a time on my calendar. Typically what we do is on Mondays we'll look ahead at the week on all the big tasks that are due and we'll start mapping those out, knowing that those things might shift around. I think this is like a really important concept for everybody to think about. Your calendar should be fluid. It does. It's not set in stone. So once you put something on your calendar, if it's got a shift due to client fires, that's okay. But we're looking at Monday and We're getting all of the tasks that I have due for the week plotted out on the calendar. I also have my assistant be the front line for all client communications. One of the big priorities for me as a business owner is that my clients always feel heard. For me, that means that all client communications are acknowledged. And I'm going to be like really hitting on that word acknowledged within one business day. Why do I say acknowledged? Because I'm not saying that you need to or that we strive to solve all of our clients problems or answer all their questions in one business day. But it is important to me that they feel heard. And so my assistant is acknowledging to them that we've received their request and then my assistant is letting them know when we're going to respond. So if a client says, hey, I need to see my P and L and balance sheet for last calendar year, I don't expect my assistant to necessarily know how to go and pull that data out. But my assistant will look at my calendar and say, oh look, Michael's got some time tomorrow from 1 to 1:30. And so she'll reach it back out to the client and say, you know, hey, we've got your request for your P and L. Michael will have that to you by tomorrow at 1:30. If you need that sooner, please don't hesitate to let me know. So it's just acknowledging to the client that they've been heard and then the assistant is coordinating with me to figure out at what point can I get that work done. The final thing that I have my executive assistant do for me is handle repeatable tasks. And there's a lot of those things that happen in my business. And I'm sure that you have a lot of those things in your business. And when I say repeatable tasks, I don't necessarily mean technical repeatable tasks. A great example is these videos and podcasts that I shoot. There's some things that involve downloading and uploading files. Then those things just have to happen every single week. My assistant handles those things for me so I don't have to worry about them. There's plenty of things in a fractional CFO firm or an accounting firm that are repeatable tasks, as well as scheduling client meetings, sending out notifications, maybe you have a newsletter. All of those kinds of things have backend repeatable tasks that are required to make them work. Those are great things for you to give to your assistant to help with you record a quick loom video that shows you walking through exactly how to do it. Voila. You have a process in place. You just share that with your assistant and they can take that off of your plate. If you're thinking about hiring an assistant, I want to share this super valuable pro tip with you. Before you even post the job that you're looking for an assistant, I want you to get crystal clear on the types of things you want your assistant to do. For years I hired assistants and I would get frustrated because the people that I hired weren't really getting the types of things done that I wanted them to do. And it was a hundred percent my fault because I was bringing them on and I wasn't even clear what I wanted them to do. I was like, come in and do assistant things. And they would come in and with the best of intentions, do the things that they thought they needed to do. But it wasn't in alignment with what I wanted them to do. And so one or both of us would end up getting frustrated and they would bounce. What I found is the best resource to help you get really clear on what it is an assistant can and should be doing for you. Is this book very nondescript cover, by the way, your World Class Assistant by Michael Hyatt. And unfortunately, at the time that I'm making this episode, you can't get it on Amazon. So I will drop a link in the description below of where you can go to find this book from Michael Hyatt's website. But I have had this book now for probably four years. I really use this book. I have got stuff flagged and highlighted all throughout the book. It's given me a ton of great ideas on the types of value that a great assistant can bring to the table for me. And what I did is I read through this book. I got really clear on the things that I wanted an assistant to do and not do. And I used that to craft the job description. I used that to help inform the interview process, and I helped use that to help inform the onboarding process. And once I identified the person that I thought would be my next great assistant, I actually bought a copy of this for them to read so they could go through and highlight it. And then as soon as they were in the onboarding process, we came together and compared notes and started coming up with a really good onboarding process to help get them an idea of what it is I needed help with and set them up for success over the long term. Again, if you're thinking about hiring, I highly recommend that you consider hiring an assistant. An assistant is going to help you get organized prioritized and give you a level of accountability that you probably desperately need. And through that organization, prioritization and accountability, it's going to set you and your business up to hire that next person. Whether it's a bookkeeper, an analyst, a cfo. It's going to set you up to hire smarter and more efficiently. I hope this was helpful. If it was, please smash the like button or the subscribe button and share it with a friend. I can't wait to see you next week. Right here, same day, same time.